Actress Lupita Nyong’o recently sat down for a chat with Trevor Noah where the topic of her Mexican roots came up.
The Oscar-winning Kenyan actress explained what many may not know about her: that she’s fluent in Spanish.
“I was born in Mexico. My father was in self-exile there for a number of years, and I was born in the last year that he was there. He was teaching political science at the university.”
Nyong’o’s parents are prominent Kenyan politician and academic Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, and Dorothy Nyong’o, an educator, philanthropist, and managing director of the Africa Cancer Foundation.
“I was born there, and then we moved back to Kenya, like shortly after I turned one,’ explained Nyong’o.
“And when I was 16, my parents were like, ‘you know what, you have a Mexican passport, you should speak Spanish, and off you go’, and they sent me to Mexico to learn Spanish. I spent seven months there, and … after one month of being there, I said, “Okay, enough with the English, no more English, I’m only going to speak Spanish.”
“And for the rest of my time there, I spoke Spanish, because I was like, ‘I want to learn this language as fully as possible, and if I allow myself to have the crutch of speaking English to the people around me, my classmates and stuff, I’m not going to pick up this language’, and so, yeah, I stopped speaking English, and it made me a very quiet person, because I didn’t have enough Spanish to, like, be conversational,” Nyong’o continued.
“But what it did is it my brain switched into survival mode, and that’s the best way to learn a language, because you pick things up and you hold on to them for dear life. I would go to the market and I would learn the names of foods, and like they would register, okay, because I need it for the next day, and I learned Spanish pretty well as a result.”